TheDaak review

Hindi Nationalism (Tracts For The Time) by Alok Rai, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 2001, Pg. 152, 14.2 x 0.8 x 21.5 cm, ISBN 8125019790, ₹341.00

By Chetna Trivedi

The linguistic divide in India had been instrumental in stipulating a breeding ground for Communalism and Hindi Nationalism since the 1800s. Gyanendra Pandey (2006) argues that by the early nineteenth century the sense of religious community was far more widespread than ever before and its implications could be seen in every sphere of the economic, social and political life of the country. Alok Rai, in his work Hindi Nationalism is investigating the manifestation of this communal sense in the language conflict. It is not merely linguistic but a political intervention in the context of the battle between Hindi and Urdu for qualifying to be the national official language of the country. It attempts to highlight the debates between the Hindi and Urdu protagonists alongside the role of the colonial state with respect to the language politics in India. This process inadvertently fueled what Alok Rai calls ‘Hindi Nationalism’, especially in  North India. The author emphasizes that his aim, through this work, is to save Hindi and in this end Hindi must emancipate itself, and protect itself from being reduced to a regional language, desperate to establish national dominance. For Rai, Hindi is the language of everyday life that had evolved in North India by the nineteenth century, which could be called Hindi, Urdu or Hindustani. This Hindi was neither Sanskritised nor “dePersianised” (Bhattacharya 2001: vii). 

 It is merely a truism that any phenomena which occur in post-colonial societies have to be traced back to colonial intervention. The colonial explanation, each time interestingly locates the sources of the conflict outside of the colonial context but acquits the native perpetrators inside of it. In this case, however, the conflict was deeply rooted in the stagnant colonial economy and the fretfulness over religious identity. It stemmed from a constant anxiety among the Hindus and the Muslims to save their identity, symbols and resources. Nevertheless, the colonial explanation remains insufficient in gauging the magnitude of the conflict, especially its progression into the communal divide. Amidst the dispute, Hindi came to be associated as the language of the populist, conservative and reactionary population, English with that of secularism and scientific temper but with a narrow democratic base and Urdu with just the culture of Muslim elite and the “rigid Maulvis” (Bhattacharya, 2001, p. vi).

The book is divided into seven chapters; the first two are dedicated to the confusion surrounding the two languages. The fundamental issue with the history of modern Hindi is the fact that it has evolved through the Hindu-Urdu struggle of the nineteenth century.  The language, in the nineteenth century essentially involved vocabulary which constituted of both- ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’ words. Rahul Sankrityayan argues, “Hindi incorporates all the languages which emerged after the eighth century AD in “suba Hindustan” (Rai, 2001, p. 13). GA Grierson, in his work Linguistic Survey of India writes that “it is commonly said and believed that throughout the Gangetic valley between Bengal and Punjab there is only one language- Hindi, with its numerous dialects” (Rai, 2001, p.14). Moreover, Sir Syed traveling across India in 1869, would argue that from Allahabad to Bombay, in villages and offices everywhere, one can converse in Urdu. The major point here is that the language, which is identified as Urdu by Sir Syed, is a lineal descendant of Hindi and its dialects, as understood both by GA Gierson and Rahul Sankrityayen. There was a simultaneous understanding that a middle common language (a mix of Hindi and Urdu) existed, but naming this language as Hindi or Urdu, or even Hindustani, was dangerous. It is precisely this naming that led to the insistence on the purist forms of the two languages, the Persianised Urdu and the Sanskritised Hindi. 

In the next two chapters, the author traces the genesis of this conflict and the various episodes, which not only intensified but also widened the curves of the crisis. The conflict began at Fort Williams College in the 1800s. The college was meant to train the British officers in ‘Hindustani’ before setting foot in the uncharted linguistic area of North India. The college bestowed institutional recognition to the idea of linguistic duality- that Hindustani could be done in two ways, with mixing available languages and dialects. The second form of Hindustani was the result of removing the Arabic Persian words to make it more suitable to Hindus. An important role in the history of linguistic division was played by the missionaries, who landed in Calcutta initially but soon proliferated to the North, in Agra and Allahabad. There was not much of a conspiracy in the endeavors of the missionary with respect to language. It was only procedural that the publishing programme of the missionaries, which they used for proliferating Christian preachings, had typical imperatives.  Therefore, the linguistic diversity in North India was to be considered, and this diversity favored Hindi. There was a requirement for a certain language with a standardised grammar, orthography etc. to publish the material. This standardisation necessitated them to use Hindi in a comprehensible and standardised manner. Historians of Hindi grammar trace the first attempts to codify Hindi and other native languages to this time. Apart from this inevitable background, which amplified the conflict, there were other reasons that intensified it.

A major reason of the conflict between proponents of the two languages was the fact that Urdu was made compulsory for any official post with a salary higher than Rs 10/per month, and the issue of unemployment among the educated class was a recurrent theme in the writings of Bhartendu Harishchandra and his contemporaries. The rebellion of 1857, carefully belittled in the “colonial historiography as the sepoy mutiny” (Rai, 2001, p.33) was another bone of contention between the two communities. The uprising had brought the Muslim feudal nobility under suspicion, and despite sizable Muslims holding official positions, there was a fear among the Muslims that they were being discriminated against. At the same time, Raja Shiva Prasad wrote to the government in favor of making Hindi the official language. He wrote that “people would be happy to accept the domination of the fair-complexioned than the “unreliable mohammanadans” (Rai, 2001, p.36). The Hindi protagonists feared losing jobs in the administration and judiciary with the lack of knowledge of Urdu. Therefore, they put forth the strongest argument through the likes of Malviya, which highlighted the contradictory nature of British policy. He argued that the British allowed and aided education in the Hindi/Nagari at the school level but did not provide them employment avenues in the administration. This argument, among many, proved to be the final nail in the coffin from the Hindi-wallahas. After this move, with the sympathies of Sir Anthony MacDonnell, on 18^th April 1900, an order was initiated, allowing permissive but not exclusive use of Dev Nagari characters in the courts of Northwestern province. This did not change the everyday official functioning much. The conflict continued to proliferate, and Urdu remained the dominant language of colonial administrative functioning. The pretext of this fear among the Hindus was rather misplaced since it was not by deliberate policy design that the colonial administration excluded any community from the employment opportunities.

Therefore, rather than merely reading the conflict as a matter of supremacy of the pure form of Hindi or Urdu, this conflict is most aptly read as the manifestation of the economic anxieties among various communities. Rai appositely puts that

“it is important to recognise the exigencies of the socio-economic situations which force impoverished societies, then and now, always and everywhere, to practise and devise strategies for practising, innovative and brutal forms of triage. If an adequate social product is to be shared out, someone must lose and these losers sometimes resigned but resentful, sometimes combative but resentful, enter the historical process in the shape of hungry and contentious groups and individuals” (Rai, 2001, p.58).

 The context in this case must not be forgotten- the sluggish and stagnant colonial economy. 

The last two chapters are dedicated to outlining the simultaneity of the inner conflict within the Hindi and modern Hindi, Urdu and the modern Urdu. The Modern Hindi and Urdu were symbolic of the pioneers of a new age of modernity, specific to the context of the 1857 revolt. The insistence upon this modernity must be read in the repression of the 1857 revolt. The suppression of the revolt necessitated that some justification be provided for losing the battle. Thus the old India, which the British intended to destroy, has to be condemned and reviled as no better. It had put immense pressure on the Indians to continue the destruction of symbols that represented this old India. This complex process played out differently among the Urdu and Hindi ideologues but did lead to a firmness of difference between- Arabic-Persianed Urdu and modern Urdu, Sanskritised Hindi and modern Hindi, and, of course, the binary of Hindi and Urdu. 

Conclusively, the present book highlights the intricacies of the complex and unending relationship of modern Hindi and the Hindu community. The persisting antagonism between Khari Boli and Braj Bhasha is instrumental in making the relationship between Hindi and the Hindu community rigid. The portrayal of Khari Boli was glossed in masculine, aggressive, and erect shades, whereas Braj was subsided as “the language of effete, passive and unmanly and feminine” (Rai, 2001, p.98). This artificially constructed femininity of the Braj language successfully mobilized the men of the Brahmins, Kayastha and the Kashmiri communities in favour of Hindi and Khari Boli (Rai, 2001, p. 100). This is perhaps where the genesis of Hindi nationalism and its rigid relationship with Hindutva could be traced. Vasudha Dalmia, however, cautions against reading Rai’s work as a simple story of a rigid relationship between Hindi and Hindutva and argues that the book offers valuable insights into the making of Hindutva but cannot be entirely confused with it (Dalmia 2003). It is the engagement with the context and multiple factors with a simultaneity which makes Rai’s work different from the work of Francesca Orsini’s The Making of the Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940 (2002) and William Gould’s Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (2004). The two works are alsoinstrumental in understanding the trajectory and politics associated with language and its implications through various lenses.Gouldtraces the complexities inside the congress amidst the language dispute unfolding in northern India and its approach towards the language politics where the genesis of ‘Hindu nationalism’ could be located. Orsini (2002) probes the relationship between the Hindi literary and political sphere through Hindi’s literary history, participation of women in the Hindi public sphere and the history of the Hindi political sphere.

The limitation of the book lies in a restricted discussion of the role of the British colonial administration with respect to the linguistic divide and the rise of Hindi nationalism. There is a possibility that the role itself was limited to providing the initial impetus of the conflict, and the later developments were more rooted in the rising religious consciousness of the communities. Nevertheless, a more intense discussion on the same was required. Apart from this, the brilliant work by Alok Rai must be read as a historiography of the economic, political, cultural and  linguistic discourse of colonial India. The contest over material possession, the politics over supremacy of identity through language, the intricacies of the language (Hindi and Urdu) formation and transformations over time, and the socio-economic nature of colonial rule have shaped the backdrop and contours of this book. These are the complex historical-contextual factors through which the current narratives of communalism, religious fundamentalism, and identity politics must also be read to capture the not-so-visible but absolutely central understanding of a phenomenon.

References

1. Bhattacharya, N (2001). Editor’s Preface, Rai A. Hindi Nationalism (Tracts for the Times) (i-ix). Orient Blackswan.
2. Dalmia, V. 2003. “The locations of Hindi”. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol 38 (14) pp. 1377-1384
3. Gould, W. 2004. Hindu nationalism and the language of politics in late colonial India (Vol. 11). Cambridge University Press.
4. Orsini, F. 2002. The Hindi public sphere 1920–1940: Language and literature in the age of nationalism. Oxford University Press.
5. Pandey, G. 2006. The construction of communalism in colonial North India. Oxford University Press.
6. Rai, A. (2001). Hindi Nationalism (Tracts for the Times) (No. 13). Orient Blackswan.